He will survive, with sorry again seeming to be the hardest word

Tony Blair must have known it was going to be all right when he rose to a great cheer from the loyalists. With a majority like that, the wall of sound is always there to envelop and protect him.

Or, to put it another way, he has miraculous powers of survival. He's like one of those Warner Bros cartoon animals. Pursued by a sheriff with a shotgun, he runs off the cliff, looks down, shrieks "Yikes!" and pedals back through the air to the safety of the cliff.

And he was helped by a fairly dismal speech from Michael Howard. It is said that as Tory leader, Mr Howard has enthused the salesforce without making the public want to buy the product. But yesterday the salesforce looked dour and unhappy. Rattled by noisy Labour MPs, unsure of his brief, Mr Howard stumbled on through his planned speech, ending with the limp line, "Why is it, for this prime minister, 'sorry' always seems to be the hardest word?" -which is exactly what Iain Duncan Smith said a year ago in a debate on the same topic.

Conservative party leaders come and go, but Elton John is always with us.

But there's nothing the Tories can do. It's too late. They are Victorian brides who realise they have made a terrible mistake. They were desperate to get married, he was the only suitor, and now there is no way of getting rid of him, short of soaking fly papers in his tea.

The prime minister adopted a slightly weary tone, as if to say, "How many times have we got to run through this?" I thought of a teacher with a group of 18-year-olds who have to re-take their A-levels. He's bored, they're bored. Outside the sun is shining, the bees are buzzing, and a game of cricket continues.

"This time, will you listen?" he says with a loud sigh. He went through the course again. The intelligence was clear. Yes, it was true that Hans Blix hadn't finished his work. But there were some countries that would never have accepted an ultimatum for Iraq, so they had had to move quickly. Just because no WMD had been found, that didn't mean the opposite was true - that there was no threat.

Michael Howard chipped in with a lawyerly point which Mr Blair thought he had already answered. "He must have been asleep at the time, for which I apologise."

It was a slightly weary joke from a slightly weary person. In his mind, Tony Blair is already in Barbados at Cliff Richard's villa, enjoying the pool, the rum punches, and the Gideon bibles scattered around the house.

He roused himself enough to assail the Tory leader, who has said that he would have voted against the motion which sent the country to war, but supported the war anyway.

"This shabby opportunism is not the solution to his problem - it is his problem.

"The public will respect someone who was for the war, or someone who was against the war. What they will not respect is a politician who says he is for and against the war in the same newspaper article!"

Mr Howard never quite recovered. And what made things worse was that William Hague made a fine speech rubbishing Blair on the 45-minute warning, and Robin Cook made an even better one. The former foreign secretary was funny, ironic, sarcastic, delicate - and lethal.

Mr Cook merely said it was "strange" that for six months John Scarlett and the prime minister had entirely different notions of what the 45-minute weapons were, in spite of having long and frequent talks.